Data Systems Group

The Data Systems Group builds innovative, high-impact platforms, systems, and applications for processing, managing, analyzing, and searching the vast collections of data that are integral to modern information societies – colloquially known as “big data” technologies. Our capabilities span the full spectrum from unstructured text collections to relational data, and everything in between including semi-structured sources such as time series, log data, graphs, and other data types. We work at multiple layers in the software stack, ranging from storage management and execution platforms to user-facing applications and studies of user behaviour. Our research tackles all phases of the information lifecycle, from ingest and cleaning to inference and decision support.

News

Maura Grossman has been named one of Fastcase's 50 for 2017. The Fastcase 50 award "honors a diverse group of lawyers, legal technologists, policymakers, judges, law librarians, bar association executives, and people from all walks of life," says a statement from Fastcase, a legal publisher who has been handing out the award since 2011. "The Fastcase 50 has spotlighted and applauded the most fascinating trailblazers and architects of the future of law and legal technology." More info here. (July 2017)

Ihab Ilyas has been elected Vice President of SIGMOD for a term of four years starting July 1. Official announcement of election results is here. (June 2017)

Ihab Ilyas has been appointed to Research Chair in Data Cleaning from Theory to Practice. The chair position is funded by Thomson Reuters. (October 2016)

Tamer Özsu has been named Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada for his contributions to data management. Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada, Canada's National Academy, comes from distinguished scholars, artists and scientists in the country. For more information see here. Congratulations Tamer.

Minyang (Young) Han, who obtained his degree under Khuzaima Daudjee's supervision last year, has won the 2016 Governor General's Gold Medal. There is only one of these awarded each year and the student is recognized at the Spring convocation. Young had three top tier publications from his thesis. More details on the School's web page here. Young now works at Google in Seattle. Congratulations to Young and Khuzaima. (25 May 2016)

Olaf Hartig, who was a post-doc with Tamer Özsu 2012-2014 has just taken an Assistant Professor positon at Linköping University in Sweden. (20 May 2016)

David Toman and Grant Weddell won the 2016 Ray Reiter Best Paper Prize for their paper "On Referring Expressions in Query Answering over First Order Knowledge Bases" that was presented at the 15th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. The paper was co-authored with their long-time collaborator Alex Borgida of Rutgers University. (27 April 2016)

Ihab Ilyas has been elected to the Board of the VLDB Endowment for a six year period starting 2016. The Board oversees the activities of the Endowment, including the annual VLDB Conference, the PVLDB journal which publishes the technical articles presented at the VLDB Conference, the VLDB Journal, and VLDB sponsored outreach activities in underrepresented countries designed to support the education/training of their database researchers. (23 November 2015)

Jaemyung Kim, Ken Salem, Khuzaima Daudjee, Ashraf Aboulnaga and Xin Pan received Best Paper Award at the 2015 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing for their paper titled "Database High Availability Using SHADOW Systems" (5 September 2015).

Lei Chen, Tamer Özsu and Vincent Oria were recognized with the Test-of-Time Award at the SIGMOD 2015 Conference in Melbourne, Australia. The award "recognizes the best paper from the SIGMOD proceedings 10 years prior ..., based on the criterion of identifying the paper that has had the most impact (research, products, methodology) over the intervening decade. " The winning paper was "Robust and Fast Similarity Search for Moving Object Trajectories," that appeared in the 2005 SIGMOD Proceedings. Lei Chen obtained his PhD from Waterloo in 2005 and Vincent Oria was Tamer's post-doc (9 June 2015).

Alexey Karyakin (supervised by Ken Salem) is the winner of SIGMOD 2015 programming contest. Alexey was the only single person "team" -- the other finalists were all 2-3 person teams. Congratulations to Alexey and Ken (7 June 2015).

Alexandra Roatiş has joined the group as a post-doctoral fellow as of January 2015. She obtained her PhD from Université Paris-Sud and Inria-Saclay and will be working with Ihab Ilyas.

Olaf Hartig and Tamer Özsu gave a tutorial entitled "Linked Data Query Processing" at the 30th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), which was held in Chicago 31 March-4 April 2014.

David Toman's co-authored paper entitled "The Combined Approach to OBDA: Taming Role Hierarchies Using Filters" has won the Best Paper Award at the 12th International Conference on Semantic Web, which was held in Sydney, Australia, 21-25 October 2013.

Xiufeng Liu has joined the group as a post-doctoral fellow as of 7 November 2013. He will be working with Lukasz Golab and Ihab Ilyas.

Ashraf Aboulnaga (along with Shivnath Babu of Duke University) gave a tutorial on "Workload Management for Big Data Analytics" and Lukasz Golab (together with Theodore Johnson) gave a tutorial on "Data Stream Warehousing" at the 2013 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data in New York City. Brief description of the tutorials are here and here. (28 June 2013)

Three groups of database researchers have received grants from Canadian Foundation for Innovation for computing infrastructure to support our research projects. Tamer Özsu, Ian Munro and Khuzaima Daudjee have received $215,414 for the project "Cluster Computing Infrastructure for Scalable Big Data Management and Analysis," that will be used to establish a 64 multi-core node cluster. Ashraf Aboulnaga (along with Hans De Sterck of Applied Math) have obtained $159,158 for their project entitled, "Research Infrastructure for Computational Analytics on Big Data in the Cloud." The funding will be used to set up a 30 multi-core node Hadoop cluster. Tim Brecht, Bernard Wong, and Ken Salem received $198,359 for their project "A Testbed for Empirical Cloud Computing Research," to build a testbed for empirical cloud computing research. University's announcement is here. (6 June 2013)

Frank Tompa was awarded an honorary degree by Dalhousie University. The citation is here (22 May 2013).

Olaf Hartig has given a tutorial entitled "Linked Data Query Processing" at 2013 World Wide Web Conference in Brazil. The conference site for the tutorial is here and the tutorial slides are available here.